Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an acclaimed American novelist and essayist. Learn about her early life, major works (including A Thousand Acres), her philosophy of writing, and her most memorable quotes.

Introduction

Jane Smiley is among the most respected voices in American fiction. Her works often explore family dynamics, rural life, moral tensions, and the contours of human relationships. In 1992 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Thousand Acres, a powerful retelling of King Lear set in Iowa.

She is not only a novelist but also a critic, essayist, and teacher. Her writing shows deep empathy, sharp insights, and an ability to weave history, geography, and the emotional terrain of ordinary lives. In this article, we’ll trace her biography, analyze her major works, reflect on her legacy, and share some of her most striking quotes.

Early Life and Family

Jane Smiley was born on September 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, California. Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, where she grew up.

Her Midwestern upbringing left a lasting mark on her sensibility: landscapes, small towns, farming life, and the rhythms of rural America frequently appear in her fiction.

From an early age, she was an avid reader. She absorbed a wide range of literature, which shaped her literary interests and ambitions.

Education and Early Career

Smiley’s formal education in literature and writing is extensive:

• She earned a B.A. in Literature from Vassar College in 1971.

• She continued her graduate studies at the University of Iowa, obtaining an M.A. and then an MFA, followed by a Ph.D. by 1978.

• During her doctoral years, she studied in Iceland on a Fulbright scholarship.

From 1981 to 1996, Smiley taught at Iowa State University, instructing creative writing workshops and courses in literature. University of California, Riverside.

Major Works and Achievements

Early Fiction & Recognition

Smiley’s first novel, Barn Blind, was published in 1980. O. Henry Award in 1985 for her short story “Lily,” published in The Atlantic Monthly. The Greenlanders (1988), which received praise though it remains relatively underappreciated.

A Thousand Acres and the Pulitzer

In 1991, Smiley published A Thousand Acres, a novel that reimagines Shakespeare’s King Lear in a contemporary Iowa farming family. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book.

Later Novels & Themes

Smiley has written many novels, often balancing large thematic scope with personal, intimate portrayals. Some of her notable works include:

• Moo (1995) — a satirical and sprawling look at life on a Midwestern university campus and farm.

• Horse Heaven (2000) — built around horse racing, covering the human drama and economics of the sport.

• Private Life (2010)

• The “Some Luck” trilogy (Some Luck, Early Warning, Golden Age) — a multigenerational saga of an Iowa farming family over the 20th century.

• Perestroika in Paris (2020) — a novel blending historical and contemporary elements.

• A Dangerous Business (2022)

• Lucky (2024) (the latest novel)

Her essays and non-fiction also include Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), a meditation on the art and history of the novel form.

Awards & Honors

• Pulitzer Prize (1992) for A Thousand Acres

• Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001.

• PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006

• Chaired the judges’ panel for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

Legacy and Influence

• Smiley is respected for blending literary ambition with accessibility: her works are deeply thoughtful yet often readily engaging.

• She helped push the boundaries of Americana fiction, showing that rural lives, farming families, and Midwestern settings can carry epic emotional and moral weight.

• Her Some Luck trilogy has been compared to great American family sagas, offering a panoramic view of social change across decades.

• As a teacher and mentor, she has influenced generations of writers through her workshops and university classes.

• Her essays and reflections (for example in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel) have enriched discourses on what a novel is, how it works, and why it matters.

Personality and Writing Style

Jane Smiley’s writing style is often characterized by:

• Clarity and precision: she crafts sentences that feel natural and yet carry weight.

• Empathy and psychological insight: her characters often grapple with moral choice, regret, desire, and familial loyalty.

• Patience and scope: she is willing to let plots unfold gradually, trusting that small moments accumulate meaning.

• Use of setting and landscape: rural spaces, farm life, nature, towns — these are not mere backdrops but deeply embedded in character and theme.

• Intertextual awareness: she often draws on or reframes older texts (as with A Thousand Acres and King Lear) and reflects consciously on the nature of fiction (in her essays).

Her public persona is thoughtful, reflective, and serious about the craft of writing. She speaks openly about the challenges, doubts, and rewards of literary life.

Famous Quotes of Jane Smiley

Here are several of her memorable statements that reveal her thinking on writing, life, family, and creativity:

“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” “Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.” “A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes … may overwhelm the system …” “With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be … you just have to take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going – you can always fix it.” “I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.” “Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.” “A novelist has two lives — a reading and writing life, and a lived life. … he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.” “The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.” “The body, the mind, and the spirit don’t form a pyramid, they form a circle. … The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction … opens the way to transcendence.”

These quotes reflect her balance of humility about craft, sensitivity about life, and intellectual curiosity.

Lessons from Jane Smiley

1. Begin bravely—but allow revision
   Her idea that “a first draft is perfect” because its purpose is simply to exist frees writers from paralyzing self-criticism.

2. Write persistently, step by step
   Fiction is often unpredictable; perseverance and trust in process matter.

3. Embrace both lives
   To be a writer is to live in dual modes: observing the world and shaping narratives.

4. Value complexity over simplicity
   Her novels show that moral ambiguity, conflicting loyalties, and flawed characters often mirror real life more faithfully than neat resolutions.

5. Root imagination in place
   Her use of setting and landscape indicates how geography and milieu can become characters in their own right.

Conclusion

Jane Smiley stands as one of America’s distinguished literary voices. Her body of work is ambitious yet humane, tackling family, change, ethics, and memory without slipping into sentimentality. Through her novels, essays, and teaching, she has enriched both literature and the lives of readers and writers.